


Winding Down

by Sakiku



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Bondage, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:54:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sakiku/pseuds/Sakiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, being wrapped and bound can be calming. Bulkhead helps Ratchet wind down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winding Down

**Author's Note:**

> Same prompt as the one for 'Bound': <http://tfanonkink.livejournal.com/10462.html?thread=9361886#t9361886>.
> 
> Takes place after the first couple of episodes of Season 1

Bulkhead knew that he was kind of... the odd mech out in their ragtag little group. He was not as clever as Ratchet, not as strong as Optimus, not as decisive as Arcee, not as adaptive as Bumblebee. Sure, he had been a Wrecker, but... Sometimes, he felt downright mediocre next to them with his average processing power and simple character.

Then again, sometimes he felt like the rock of stability that kept them together, gave the others something to fall back on when the universe went further and further down the pit with every spark extinguished. Or when everything simply became too much.

He had been watching Ratchet for several solar cycles now. Ever since Cliffjumper had been killed, actually. The medic hadn't recharged a single joor, and by now almost an orn had passed. An orn filled with the terrifying return of Megatron, with Dark Energon, with destroying their only hope of reaching Cybertron, with destroying _Cybertron_ , with battles and fear and anger and just too much to process.

And now that everything was over, Ratchet was still not recharging despite the magnesic fizzle of his fields. Instead he was devoting increasingly manic time on taking over the little humans' _school projects_.

Jack, Raf and Miko had left nearly a joor ago, Miko with Bumblebee for a change, and Ratchet was still flitting between the model of the star system, of the volcano, and of the... vehicle. Or whatever it was supposed to be. He was tightening screws, polishing plates, painting edges, doing anything to stay occupied in Bulkhead's opinion.

Finally Bulkhead sighed and placed one of his large (and ungainly compared to the medic's) hands on Ratchet's shoulder. “Ratchet. Enough,” he rumbled, trying to press his stable fields against the medic's chaotic whirls. “You need to rest.”

The red and white medic rounded on him, a fanatic light in his optics that Bulkhead didn't like. “The photon converter's not completely done yet, and Cybertron is still missing Iacon's towers. Resting can wait! Now let me go and get back to my work!”

But he didn't shake off Bulkhead's palm.

“Ratchet,” Bulkhead simply repeated and calmly wrapped his other arm around the medic's torso, which immobilized Ratchet's elbows against his sides. “Enough.”

While they were nearly of the same height, Bulkhead weighed in at more than twice as much. Ratchet's struggles didn't faze him too much, not when Ratchet wasn't using any weapons and didn't have any leverage. And this was one of the very few situations where Bulkhead didn't yield to Ratchet's superior rank or command power.

Finally Ratchet gave a sigh and slumped against Bullkhead's chest armor. Most of his anger seemed to have burned out, leaving only his fields a simmering melt of metastable redox byproducts. “Let go of me, you lump of scrap,” he groused quietly but didn't continue his efforts to free himself.

“You need to recharge.”

Ratchet stiffened, some small magnesic bursts reigniting in his fields. “You think I can't read my own energy levels?”

“I think you have been active for more than two orn, and even for an energy-efficient mech like you that has to be taking it very close to your limits.”

There was no immediate protest, which was a confirmation in and of itself. They just stood there for several klicks.

“There's too much to do,” Ratchet said after a long pause.

“There's nothing that can't wait until the next solar cycle.”

“The projects - “

Bulkhead cut him off exasperatedly, something that he normally never would have done. “ - look fine. Come on, do you need to be tied down before you stop working yourself to the ground?”

When Ratchet once again paused for a suspiciously long time and his EMs twisted with a longing chrome hue, Bulkhead realized that what he had said in jest was actually what Ratchet wanted. It wouldn't be the first time either that exactly that had helped calm the irate medic.

“Do you?” he asked again, completely serious this time.

Ratchet vented harshly against Bulkhead's plates, but didn't protest any. It was a sign of just how exhausted Ratchet had to be that he capitulated this easily.

Bulkhead released him, but didn't take his digits off Ratchet's shoulder. Instead, he slid them to rest on the armor plates above Ratchet's backstruts and gave a small push. “Come on, Ratch. Let's go.”

His passive sensor sweeps registered Optimus finally moving from the doorway he had lingered in, deeper into the missile silo. Now that Bulkhead was taking care of things, Optimus would try and give them as much privacy as they needed.

Bulkhead steered Ratchet towards their shared quarters – not enough space in the human structure for individual rooms for all of them. But between patrol shifts and monitor shifts and Ratchet spending a lot of time trying to get human technology to do things it had never been intended for, they rarely recharged at the same time. It was nothing more than two berths and a table littered with trinkets Ratchet was tinkering with, anyway.

Ratchet was dragging his pedes more than his fatigue could be made responsible for. Bulkhead didn't say anything; instead he simply put a bit more strength behind the push he was exerting on Ratchet's back plates. And Ratchet went, with all the grace of a sulking sparkling made to get its second injection of booster nanites. Ratchet's words, not his, and applied to an entirely different situation. But Bulkhead thought it fit anyway.

He left Ratchet standing in the center of their quarters, a towing cable wrapped around his wrists and loosely tied together, his fields churning down into a caustic sludge of immobility. Even without anything else restraining him, the medic was suddenly holding himself as if there were heavy shackles binding his arms and legs. Bulkhead had long ago learned that this was the way to get Ratchet to stay in one place. Ratchet's servos were his most restless feature, and when tied somehow the rest of the mech followed along. Bulkhead needed to go look for the rest of the things he needed. Cables and ropes were all fine and good, but not what Ratchet wanted. Needed.

During his search, he found Optimus in one of the storage rooms, rummaging through bins of... stuff... which Bulkhead hadn't even known they had. Was that human eating utensils, made from a carbon-based polymer?

Upon his entrance, Optimus looked up and smiled slightly despite the way grief and guilt etched his fields like hydrocloric acid. He looked so incredibly tired; almost as tired as Ratchet had once Bulkhead had bound his hands. “Thank you, Bulkhead. I doubt he would have taken well to an invention from me.”

“Ah, you're welcome.” Bulkhead scratched his helmet sheepishly, not quite knowing what to say. He never quite knew what to say to Optimus, because he was... well, Optimus. Their prime. Their strongest and best warrior. The closest link to Primus they had now that Cybertron was irrevocably _gone_. Someone a working mech like Bulkhead wouldn't have caught a glimpse of, let alone talked to, during his entire function if they had still been on the Cybertron of old. “Um. I think I'll leave you to your... stuff then. Sorry for disturbing you.”

Optimus set down the eating utensils, his fields lightening a bit on the surface. “You didn't disturb me. Was there anything you needed?”

Was there something he needed? “Eh, well... do we have any... metal mesh? I found some plastic tarps, but... ah, I don't think they'll work.” Because plastic had a nasty habit of first deforming and then melting when heated. And the last thing Bulkhead wanted was Ratchet disassembling him afterwards because he had managed to gum up Ratchet's internals. Or his own.

Optimus shook his head. “I thought about requisitioning some mesh from the humans several decaorns ago, but all their commonly available wire-woven structures are...”, he grimaced briefly, “crude at best. Either they are too stiff to use for anything but small armor patches, or they are easily deformed. They do have alloys and the necessary knowledge to create true metal mesh, but production is expensive. Too expensive to justify when we have so many more pressing needs.” He motioned towards a pile in the corner. “This is the best alternative I could get.”

It looked like tarp, but – not. It was narrower, some kind of off-whitish fabric rolled up around a stick as long as his forearm. Bulkhead's sensors identified the material as distinctly organic in composition. And not the kind of organic as plastic was. When he went to pick it up, it was heavier than it looked because of the tight coils. Nearly as heavy as a bale of metal mesh of the same size.

He unrolled a couple meters and tested the fabric. Its high thread count, more than any but the finest metal fabrics he knew of, gave it a strength he hadn't expected from threads spun of cellulose fibers. However, when faced with sharp metal edges it quickly developed holes. It wouldn't be a material to use, but rather to use _up_.

“Heat resistant?” he asked contemplatively

“Burns at about 480 degree Kelvin with only slight ash residue. Discoloring and lessening of structural soundness for about 30 degrees before that.”

Would be a tight fit then. A mech with a charge building could easily heat up to 420, 450 degrees. Ratchet definitely wouldn't expend the effort to keep his surface temperature within an acceptable human range of 290 to 310 Kelvin.

Then again, that probably was wishful thinking on Bulkhead's part. Ratchet neither wanted nor needed an overload when he was frazzled like this, and Bulkhead wasn't going to come close enough to do any damage to the fabric.

Quick calculations revealed that there were nearly fifty meters of fabric rolled up on that one single bale – about three times the amount than he would have gotten with metal mesh. With that kind of density, one bale would probably be enough.

He turned his attention back to Optimus. “Can I have one of these? I...” He looked away uncomfortably. “I don't think you'll be getting it back in one piece though. I'll try, but... yeah.”

Optimus chuckled, temporary copper alloys glimmering in his fields. “I know. As you can see, there are several more. We won't miss one. Sailcloth is by far cheaper than any metal fabric would be.”

“Thank you.” Bulkhead wasn't going to ask what Optimus had bought the sailcloth for in first place – it might make some medium-coarse polishing rags, but any of the other things wiremesh was used for were out of question. And anyway, Optimus would look ridiculous with some kind of cape fluttering behind him, metal mesh or not. “G'night.”

“Good night, Bulkhead.”

With a hesitant wave, Bulkhead backed out of the storage room and headed back to where he had left Ratchet, Optimus' fields slowly sinking back into their hydrochloric scarred guilt behind him.

Ratchet hadn't moved a millimeter. He was still standing in the center of their room, shoulders hunched, servos clenching every now and then but making no attempt at all to get rid of the towing cable tying them.

The medic looked up briefly when Bulkhead entered, but his second glance was down to the bale of sailcloth. He looked very taken aback. And then a light sneer developed – just as it always did when the inferiority of organics-made things was about to be mentioned.

“No,” Bulkhead preempted him, not least of all because he had been getting tired of Ratchet's high-handed attitude. It rankled him a bit that Ratchet automatically assumed that anything different from the high standards he was used to, was worse. He unrolled an armlength of the bale and showed it to the medic, how it folded itself to the contours of his armor much smoother than wiremesh. “This will work just fine. You'll see.”

Ratchet scowled and clenched his servos but didn't say anything. He almost never said anything when his servos were bound. His fields did the talking for him, and if Bulkhead had been more sensitive to EMs he would have flinched from the taste of scathing acid. Instead, he continued without a reaction.

Crouching in front of the medic's pedes, Bulkhead motioned for him to place his legs closer together. With a subvocal grumble Ratchet obeyed, looking down at him above his bound servos. Bulkhead started wrapping the cloth around his ankles, several layers to hold down the loose end. It took some fiddling to work out how to keep it in place, but he managed. Then he slowly started wrapping upwards, shins, knees, thighs, hiding Ratchet's complicated leg assembly from view.

Every time he was so close to the medic, he wanted to caress the wheel wells, the armor seams, the wires beneath. Ratchet's body was a marvel of engineering, sturdy but light, strong but not as bulky as Bulkhead was. He wanted to twist his fields deep into Ratchets', flare his EMs until Ratchet's entire frame was pulsing in the same frequency and demanding more. He wanted to tweak and tease and pleasure and see how Ratchet struggled against the bindings that made him unable to respond in any kind.

But it wasn't what the medic wanted or needed, so Bulkhead never let any hint of his arousal slip into his fields. Instead he kept winding the fabric in a slow and unhurried pace

He didn't stop to release the medic's servos; instead he wrapped over them, pressing them tight against Ratchet's groin, his arms against his sides. And up he went, more loops across torso and arms, getting thicker towards the shoulders and closing vents that normally facilitated heat exchange. Ratchet was still watching him with the peculiar expression he always adopted upon getting wrapped. Partly with bemusement, partly with a distance and detachment in his optics that was growing further by the microclick. The fire had gone out of him, and the acid had left his fields. Instead his EM reeked of tired ashes, and from the sound of the medic's systems he wasn't far from cycling down.

Ratchet had once told him that he didn't quite remember what it reminded him of. It was just that nothing made him feel safe and secure like being wrapped from head to toe. Perhaps some forgotten memories from early sparklinghood. Perhaps something else. But as long as it helped him wind down and actually get some recharge, Bulkhead didn't care.

Not even if it meant Bulkhead would never get what _he_ wanted.

Slowly unrolling more and more of the cloth, Bulkhead worked his way up to Ratchet's head, tightening a layer across audials and optics before going down again because he had still some fabric left. It didn't impede Ratchet's non-photonic sensors, but the reduction of input was welcome. The medic's fields were settling into a sludge of grief and ever-increasing tiredness despite his body heating up from his closed vents. He kind of reminded Bulkhead of that one movie about Egypt that Miko had demanded he watched, that one where a mummy got brought back to life. It had taken Bulkhead quite some time to realize that it was just some story, and that no, mummies weren't a human form of stasis-lock but a way to preserve their bodies after deactivation. Arcee had teased him quite badly about that.

Finally he ran out of fabric. He was almost down to Ratchet's hips again, and so he tugged at the end a bit and secured it beneath the previous layer of cloth. A test revealed that its friction coefficient was high enough to prevent it from slipping out again, and so he considered this part of his work done.

Ratchet had locked his limbs somewhere down the line, so it was an easy thing to tip the medic backwards until Bulkhead could lift him up. Ratchet was unwieldy, being nearly the same eight as him, but he was by far lighter. And Bulkhead was used to lifting things several times his own weight. It was no trouble for him to carry the medic to the berth less than two steps away. The most challenging task with all that was trying not to hit Ratchets helmet or pedes anywhere in their limited space.

But he managed to settle Ratchet without mishap, sitting himself down on the ground next to Ratchet's berth afterwards. He rested his back against the cool metal, his shoulders only spans away from Ratchet's considerably warmer body. But even that cooled down with the medic's steady downcycling, until his fields swung into the monotonous graphite of deeply exhausted recharge.

And as always Bulkhead kept a silent vigil, slowly teasing his own seams because Ratchet never needed him that way.

He was only their rock after all.


End file.
